It's time for us to catch up with these hard facts, and take a fresh
look at our situation with a news roundup about the linguistically remote
Slovenians at home, from
the himself-linguistically-isolated English outsider on the inside.

Though I
was on Slovenian territory, I wrote "The Chycken" in
English.

Right away
you can see "pičanec"
is a rubbish trochee. Slovene grammar would have messed up all the
rhymes and metre, and I wouldn't have been able to make any jokes.

Also, by using English Slovenia can get something out of
it for free.

Economy

Slovenia has neither shed the command economy nor managed to get the Pope's hand out of its trousers.

Students,
cigarettes,
alcohol, foreigners' houses and clerical sex abuse are among the items which can
be bought more cheaply in Slovenia, while food, medicine, driving, and life-wrecking
bureaucrats are all more expensive.

Ptuj is trying to pass itself off as something it is not, with
comedic contrasts.

In the
decade since www.ptuj.co.uk appeared chicken factory odour levels and frequencies have improved, though not markedly.

Now clearing their own air was all
the Slovenians' own idea. To make your
own tourist town less smelly with your own smell is hardly a compromise.

It takes bitter jealousy and sweet sweet wine
to make this the "fault" of a single foreign individual's inability at Slovenian.
Then you can hit him.

Language: The National Poet's Story

Just as
a sea-bed dwelling creature cannot describe the sea or sky, there are some things about
Slovenia that its public relations efforts are never going to mention.

Years
in, being hopeless at the official language of a country you live in is
a less-than-ideal situation. But is this the whole story?

Clue 1: Not speaking Slovenian surprises few of those I meet.

Clue 2:
It's a stick even polite, reserved people can beat you with. But
especially drunk people. And poor people. And people who think
themselves deserving of more than they have. And people who
wish your goat would die.

And most of
all, people who are all of these things.

Clue 3: English speakers married to or divorced from Slovenians
seem to know roughly the same or less of Slovene than this underestimated lonesome boy.

Yes, that's
right, it's easier to get through a whole marriage and raise children without being
hassled over this language - than a night out in Ptuj.

These
couples - interracial insults to the Slovene gene puddle - mostly paired up well
away from Slovenia. But why?

Of greater
importance to the Slovenian male than getting it on with a girl is
stopping other males from doing that.

For to many
a drunk jock, the Slovenian bitch - yes, they really do
call them that with a straight face - is closely related to a football or
basketball.

The game is
to tackle, block, or otherwise prevent all your opponents from scoring with this
object - and to ultimately force your way through the opposing defences and get
a point.

The
difference between bitchball and other sports is that in this game, no-one will
be cheering when you score. No-one at all.

In line
with peoples' easy distraction by image and external appearances over
sincerity and actual ability, Slovenia's bitchball is less a physical game: but you can
score a put-down, seize a backstabbing opportunity, or strangle any incipient
intimacy at birth by taking part in the marathon gossip.

In the
resulting drinking race, competitors' best shots consist of not much of a
variety of Catholic fearmongering, faux-moralistic, nationalist, or linguistic
arguments. Note that the Catholics are very keen to insert sporty thinking
very early into every child's education, as a rational excuse for sexual
segregation, and to drive out lust.

That's as
far as they've got. Like sportily-inclined audiences everywhere, their
world view is all full.

The lady
balls don't get much of a say in this sports-based love model except to delude
themselves that this frantic competition over their possession must mean they
are highly desired.

So
ownership, trophy wives, and victory over your rivals are the key points of the
Slovenian love model.

Unsurprising, then, that disappointment awaits. Lurking
at the end of the bitchball tournament, and shortly into the love story itself,
is the awful revelation that ball-grabbing skills honed in battle have no
application in marriage, and that the player risks ending up as pointless as a
solitary footballer.

Finding
himself in his dressing room, with no JISM* nearby and the ball
supposedly totally under his control, he is baffled, directionless. *Jealous Interrupting Slovenian Males

Lacking the clearly defined aims of the battle to which he has long become
accustomed, he soon returns to the safety and familiarity of the playing field - the bars
and paid-for sexual transactions of his youth.

Besides a
total fertility rate of 1.31, what is the final
score in this homoerotic lovefest? It is that Slovenians bet large on away
fixtures.

Here's the
routine. Using some educational pretext, firstly sprint well out of the reach
of the claustrophobic alcoholic "morality", prejudice and your village
envy-thon, with all its Catholic quicksand, beady-eyed whispered warnings and
inevitable condemnations.

To get your
rocks off without their opinions, you will need to go to another country!

Here, hook up (in
English) with a non-Slovenian person. At this point you may forget the
linguistic misfortune of your birth. Travel broadens the mind, and none
more than the Slovenian one.

Optionally
if not optimally, you may return with your captive alien to Slovenia, and defiantly present your fait accompli relationship to your
grandmothers and the drunk boys.

Over vampi
and marnica your new partner, who has vowed to follow
you to the ends of the earth, may start to wish you hadn't taken them quite so
literally.

The
Slovenians' exploration of other European tourist facilities, with its
necessary but temporary escape from their novelty-phobic villagers, often has the
unfortunate side-effect of trapping a newcomer inside
Slovenia's ingrown lingosphere
and the reactionary reality from which - as their return implies - it is inseparable. Strictly, reactionary is the wrong word
- you have to have progressed, to want to go back.

A typical Slovenian interracial love story.

This page was composed in 2012 by the way.

So much for
the theory and rules of bitchball. How did I perform in practice? My girl
had hightailed it back to England almost as soon as we'd arrived. I was forced to
improvise, and search for a local replacement. But I was doing it all
wrong.

I was a
foreign guy looking for a woman in Slovenia. Most turned out to be Slovenian.
Etiquette (meaning
their fear) required I go and meet them in a different country, where the confines of
their jibber-jabber would be undeniable. But I was messing with the
routine: everything was the wrong way around.

Am I really
into chicks who would rather stab pins in their eyes than suffer the curses of
their fellow peasants?
Whaddya think? Slovenian ladies are,
after all, only doing as they're told, in the name of modesty.

Dressing up
in a gold tasselled bikini to sprawl around on a car doesn't really count.
In home mode, they are as sensitive about the hegemony of the foreign penis as
they are dulled to the requirements of the local ones.

As my
search for the love began, the
barflies' jaws began their inevitable descent.

Protecting
the womenfolk from anything that isn't drunk and watching football was their first
priority. Soon I was the only man interested in sex in the village.

My odd
priorities - how could this be more important than drinking, and football? -
were exposed! Clearly the best defence of the low bar set by the local
menfolk was to publicise that sex was actually my motivation for coming to
Slovenia. But that wasn't the plan at all, or I'd have left the other one
behind.

My next
problem in Slovenia was dancing. It's just
about ok for the trendier chaps to shuffle around a bit in a drunken stupor, lamely
punching the air to the antiseptic throb of a Europharmaceutically assisted drum
machine.

The older
girls may go gogo on their own. And me. Try to ignore the yokel stares from over
by the bar, as watchful eyes surveil for clues on foreign mating behaviour. If things are going too well their owners may cut in - not to
dance, but to distract withThe Questions, to quieten your flailing arms
with the compulsory drink, or both.

My superior
on this terpsichorean frontier - who has passed exams in dance and everything -
even had his unconventional gyrations reported to the bouncers!

Samozavestni - the literal translation of "self-conscious" in Slovenian - means
a good thing. In some ancestors' benighted century "self-conscious" became
"self-aware"...then became "self-limiting". One thing of which Slovenia
cannot be accused is attention-seeking.

To deal
with this dancing threat - that self-conscious football drunks might not be a girl's
only option - my Slovenian-language reputation was
redesigned by the Catholic elders and I became the only gay woman-chaser in the
village.

But dancing
in the farming hinterlands? This embarrassing protrusion of unauthorised and difficult to limit
foreign movement was nervously placed in an unconvincing "British eccentricity"
category. Slovenia has categories handy for every nationality.

Of course
it is easy for a sexually hung-up boondocks Catholic to classify a solitary
bopping deadhead as an attention-seeker, when his own standard dancing model is
either pole-dancing, or somewhere to the right of Iran.

One night
offered a glimpse into this country's joyless, accountant's animus. As I
set one highly disinfected Catholic dancefloor alight, a Karaddic-coiffured man's unflinching stare
was explained to me thus: "He's wondering why you're doing this for nothing," a sympathiser
whispered.

There is
dancing now, in the town where music itself was once prohibited. These
adventurers must ignore the majority's Yugo-albatross burden upon their necks.
They avoid eye contact, perhaps worried they'll be reported to the authorities, antipsychotics prescribed, and
lead weights sewn into to their clothing.

On age
matches, Ptuj proved no less creative in its commentary on the alien's love
situation. Again there is really no model, as by my age most Slovenians
have succumbed to brewer's droop.

Word went out about the only gay heterosexual
pedophile in the village.

With Ptuj's
investigation of British sexuality - and its oddly skewed sample - now thoroughly under way, determined interrogation by the menfolk
revealed my worrying reluctance to go along with their casual, ignorant
disparagement of the many inferior races.

Immediately, I became the only gay heterosexual pedophile nigger-lover in the
village.

I began to
suspect religion might have a role to play in all of this.

As their
probing revealed the shocking news of my comfortable, difficult to
control atheism, shocked villagers rushed to alert one another about the gay,
heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving Devil-worshipper in their village.

But then it
became clear that I hadn't, in fact, spent my entire life living in one place.

Word went
out about the gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving Devil-worshipping
gypsy in the village.

When the
alcohol-tobacco-cocaine-sport lobby found themselves (I thank Professor Nutt
among others) on a different side in the war on drugs I became the only gay,
heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping gypsy heroin junkie in the
village.

Eventually the locals worked out that the name
Julian contained also contained a useful clue, and I became the only jewish
gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping gypsy heroin
junkie in the village.

BUT!
A troubling fact persisted following my welcome into Slovenia's arms. Even with the
well-known jewish gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving, Devil-worshipping, gypsy
junkie successfully sexually and economically
quarantined, concerned defenders of the culture of drinking/smells/men and women
not liking each other very much had not become rich enough themselves to barf, cough, and snort to sport all
day long.

They were
still living with their folks. And I wasn't. Perhaps lawyers would
be needed. Something wasn't fair.

It was
proved there was no positive (for them) motivation for my somewhat unassimilated presence at all.
I was just an unwelcome reminder that they've been born in a square country with
a rather
unpopular language.

Slovenia
could deal with this existential reality only one way: by not actually dealing
with it.

Consequently I became the only gay, heterosexual, pedophile, nigger-loving,
Devil-worshipping, gypsy junkie foreign spy in the village.

I'm not even a proper Englishman, they complained, referencing my
lack of interest in
watching men running around in shorts. They, of all people, should have realised I am too busy with
my womanising gay jewish pedo Satanic nigger-loving junkie gypsy secret agent work.

Staggering
out of the chauvinistic alcoholic Catholic mists and nationalist myths, to
defend the honour of the Slovenian vadge, a real-life
foreign weakness wobbled into focus!

Here was someone - who thanks to his excessive
novelty and
interestingness amongst the townsfolk - had somehow been deprived of the type of company usually
responsible for
99% of all conversation - who couldn't speak
Slovenian.

Like a
shoal of herrings, the town reacted as one. They
weren't allowed to dance, or get laid, or indeed have any kind of non-alcoholic
fun, under threat, it seems, of social banishment. They couldn't find any
privacy away from their own microscopically detailed investigation of themselves
- nor dare to be more or less than the average of themselves.

But ah -
the language - we've got you there. Half lurching, half pouncing like
drunken cats on my linguistic handicap
brought Slovenia brotherhood and strength, some hope of a unified resistance to
its
invasion by the foreign enemy and his non-phonetic but flexible,
uninflected, tongue.

Taunting
"the English" for his linguistic, erm, limitation became the European Capital of Chicken's fourth favourite pastime
after drinking, smoking and football...and the first
new one since the demise of Mithraism.

And so back
to my whacking. Clue 4: No-one seems to care about my language
abilities more than tonight's zealous
lingo-evangelist assailant.

He keeps on
and on being a real bummer about it and looks increasingly
dangerous. If anything happens to me, it'll be them.

But who knows, not too much should change. Perhaps
international poetry gatherings and interracial punch-ups can find a space to
work together.

How do we know these local traditions are not mainly racist, or mainly linguistic?

Well,
firstly because Slovenian politics operates on exactly the same
mudslinging, kindergarten level. Secondly the locals who can't afford to
go to another country to pull have to go through the same shit in
their own search for lurve, in a performance which, like the politicians',
basically involves everyone trying to mess things up for everyone else.
Imagine a kind of desperate, last-woman-standing, Alomo
kind of a situation.

I haven't
visited all the ideologically-damaged backwaters, so I can't compare. But
someone
gave someone the child until he was seven, and that someone gave Slovenia the
man (and woman). When not embezzling, Slovenians are good boys and girls,
dreaming of acceptance by any organisation the Church of Creepy Crap has disguised itself as -
and in need of guidance.

Alcohol, they say in Ptuj, is even in the air. If mood and
empathy can result simply from airborne molecules - or their absence - a blank
sheet would be a good starting point for an examination of a "Slovenian
psyche/mentality".

However such an empirically-based point of view is unlikely to be
promoted by politicians or considered by the commentator during bar-room
screenings of the UEFA cup, or by the ECB, or by nations preparing for war.

And the determined Slovenian anglophobe cares not for awkward
obstetric facts, as to
why I have no chance with their rrrrrr noise.

Language is
not really his agenda. Were I to excel at Slovenian I would be stealing
"his" language and open, I'm sure, to many other criticisms.

As the
child of bigots myself I'm fully aware of how they always
try to rationalise their phobias. Clue 5.

Back to the
poetry and whine. My house is too big, he's sure. Why don't I just
sell the house for less than I paid - for EUR 20000 maybe - and get out of
Slovenia, he suggests. We're still on the language issue, remember. Clue 6.

He starts
muttering how
"his" Slovenian system can - abracadabra! - deliver "his" too-big
house "back" to him from foreign hands.

Whereupon
he probably expects to sit in it
watching those better foreign TV programmes dubbed
into his village argot, while bundles of foreign money flow pilotlessly
inwards.

Not much to ask. This, then, is Tito's legacy?

Rehypothecation Slovenian-style: sold, but we still own it

Clue 7: Virtually no-one in Ptuj expects to pay the one person
who is really best at English for any kind of work. But every man-jack-and-jill
of them expects to use him to get their English right for free, whenever they
feel like it.

Clue 8:
But they'd expect me to pay EUR 15 for a painfully thin 45 minute
Slovenian class! The teacher would act like it was pointless and useless.

Indeed. It would be like demolishing a motorway toll gate, a
profitable obstacle. With a toothpick.

Were this hypothetical language institution's extraordinary activities
discovered, it could easily experience a commercially disastrous small-town
Amish-style shunning from our patriotic friend and his
ilk.

Anyway, this poem is not stolen from a Slovenian one.

Blake fans will recognise "The Tyger"
whose trochaic tetrameter catalectic verses (about a blast furnace/foundry) are
described in Wackopedia as the most anthologized poem in English.

Rocco's is the quietest, least problematic late-night establishment in town.
After some poetry and wine why not nip round the corner for a lapdance? Or vice
versa...

The Great Deletion... and fragmentation of
the complete works of NPOSIALPU

Much of NPOSIALPU's commentary - covering
the increasingly cataclysmic period of Slovenian events from mid-2012 on -
originally appeared in The Slovenia Times and related to then current political
and business events referred to in the ST's articles.

For a couple of years the Slovenians'
fragile egos only occasionally got the better of them. So during the reigns of
Jana II and Alenka The Legs,
there were just a few skirmishes to keep poems on the board.

Like all PR operations, the selling of
Slovenia is a struggle to make the "good" highly visible, and make the "bad"
disappear. In Slovenia itself this is simply a matter of everyone
forgetting. But an historical record cannot go on like that.

But lo, in the First Quarter Moon of the
Reign of Miro I,
during the Ninth Year of the Ptuj Smell Wars, A Great Deletion of NPOSIALPU-tagged
comments occurred at The ST. For verily did their armies smite those verses,
resulting in the disappearance of 200-300 poetic gems.

At the same time all reader input was
blocked.

To save you heading off to where the
poems used to be, only to be disappointed, the RED CROSS has been brought
in to SAVE SLOVENIA'S NATIONAL POETRY HERITAGE.

Each RED CROSS highlights the
wider issue of PR-control of political commentary in cyberspace, including the
use of sockpuppets and shills, and the problem of the dead hand of government
de-voicing unwelcome truth-seekers with anything from account disablement to
100% gagging as in this case.

It is a media site owner's decision what to
publish. They tend to like business and war, is the problem, while equality and
the environment are treated as a bit of a joke, as you'll see.

The ST's comments area was a
laissez-faire exception to encroachment on free speech, and I'm guessing I speak
for four or five of us when I say we're sorry to see it go.

Where you see the RED CROSS, you will be
taken automatically to the deleted works at
NPOSIALPU's Google+ entry
- with a link back to the original turmoil, and the comments which were
permitted to remain.

[2017
P.S.] I gave up on the graphics for this. They were all deleted. Go to Google+.